Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-22-the-lens-of-time

 

Key Points: Time! Setting? Day versus night? The when of the character? Anticipation and flashbacks, expectations and disappointments. Magnified moments. What is the character noticing? Order or sequence of time. Time as an extension of setting. Associations with time of day. Personal physical cycles! Conveying passage of time. Children, other changes. Sensory details, obligations. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 22]

 

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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 20, Episode 22]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] The Lens of Time.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And this is Dr. Who.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we've been talking about these different lenses that you can look at a story through. We're looking at the idea of where and when, and time is one of the big lenses. You don't have to be working on a historical piece of fiction to be thinking about time. All stories move through time, even if it's only for a moment. So we're going to be talking about time as your setting. The differences between a story that's set during the day versus at night, or even a scene or a moment. We're going to be talking about how you can use time to your advantage. Not so much in a structural way, but more in that sense of controlling the reader's experience of the story and the character and the setting.

[Erin] We are going to be doing that.

[Dan] Love it.

[Erin] And we're starting now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When you are sitting down to think about a story, I know, Erin, that you often start with a voice and that you are very much thinking about the character. How much is the character... At that stage, are you thinking about the when of the character?

[Erin] I think a lot... So. I saw a very interesting tweet a long time ago that said that one of the ways you can upgrade your craft is to move time in the story. To actually use anticipation and flashbacks… Not necessarily, like, an entire flashback, but just what is your character coming from? What are they looking back to? What are they looking forward to? And, like, playing with that in the story. That in truth, and in our own lives, we rarely just move forward in time. We're often thinking about, like, our expectations, which is our vision of the future, and our disappointments, which is our reckoning with the past. And so, a lot of times, I really think about how my characters are reckoning with the time they are in in their own times. And, like, also the time that the world around them is in. Are they in sync? Like, are they moving forward in a world that's moving forward with them? Do they want to hold back in a world that they're like they love tradition, but the world wants progress? And then, looking at that as a source of tension in the story, between the way that they're dealing with time and the way the story and the world is.

[Mary Robinette] I love this idea of looking at where they are in time and using that anticipation as a source of tension. That… You're making me think of something that I just did a brief reread of which is in Dune, which is the fight between Paul Atriedes and Jamis, when he has to, like, "Hello! No, here I am! The Chosen One." And what's interesting in that scene is the way Frank Herbert plays with time. It's happening at a particular point in Paul's life and… Where he's a young man, he's approaching a point where he is going to kill for the first time. That is a threshold, that is a time threshold. That's going to be a marker. Before he killed, and after he killed. That's how his world is going to divide. But the other thing that he does in that is that he does these very small flashbacks to before he is in this thing, where he's thinking about my training taught me this. And all of that is setting up this anticipation of the ways the scene can go wrong, the ways that it can potentially go right, but mostly the ways it can go wrong. It's looking at the… That he's been trained in this one particular way, to go very slow against the shield, and that he keeps making the same mistake over and over again because of his training. And so you've got this contrast of this… His knowledge… His history compared with the future that he's aiming for and this anticipation of all the possible paths for which it can go wrong, which is, I think, one of the great things that you can play with with time, is the… Is letting the reader know, oh, there's more than one path for this. There's more than one path, there's more than one way that this can go wrong. You don't know which of those possible futures you're going to land in.

 

[Dan] Yeah. One of the other things going on in that scene is… That also plays with time is what my seventh grade English teacher always used to call a magnified moment. Where it's really an exchange of blows that takes probably ultimately maybe 30 seconds. I think in the movie, it was drawn out to 40 or 45 seconds. But it's still very short. Whereas the actual excerpt is two or three pages worth of material. Because every single second, every single step, every single move of the blade is given this momentous weight. And so it is expanding things out and magnifying every little moment that takes place into this huge, kind of glorious, thing.

[Erin] I love that… I was thinking about, like, fight scenes and love scenes are two of the ones in which the time in which it's taking on the page and the time it was probably taking in the life of the characters are so different. I'm curious, like, how like… Like, how do you make that moment… Like, how do you make it slow down and not fade as it feels momentous? But not slow down so much that people are, like, wow, I've been on three chapters of the same, like, sword cut, and, like, I wish they would do it already…

[Laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] is it just, like, let… Like, how do you, like, actually make time slow and speed within something?

[Mary Robinette] I think that there's two pieces that you're playing with. One is the character's awareness of time, and the other is the actual amount of time that it takes the reader to experience it. So, one of the things that happens in the example that we were just using is 2 to 3 pages takes several minutes to read. And… Unless they are listening to some [garbled] to speed.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is that reader experience of it will slow it down. Sometimes when something is slow down in ways you don't want it to be… Fight scenes that are slow in ways that are not helping the story… It is because you're taking too long to get us through it. Likewise, you can speed things up by compressing it so that the reader's actual experience of reading it is shorter. Like, physically shorter. But then there's also what the character is noticing. Sometimes you can create a sense of, oh, this took forever, by lingering on the character's experience, feeling all of the things that they feel. The kinds of things that I've been thinking about lately are what they're noticing, where they feel it in their body. It's not that you have to hit all of these beats, but that each time, you hit one of those, you are having the character live that moment again. So if I have my character picking up a sword, and the first thing that happens is that we describe what the sword looks like, and then the next thing is the character experiences the physicality of picking it up. The weight of it, the heft, the balance. We've now experienced that sword twice. If we think about, this was the sword my father gave me, that's a third time that we're experiencing it. If we think… If we cut through the air, if we try some simple bl… Strikes with it, that's a fourth time that we're experiencing it. But all of those are things that probably happen almost immediately for the character. So, those are ways to slow it down, but also to be conscious that sometimes you don't want to slow it down, and you want to just pick one of those, the one that is most distinct to the character, the one that is most demonstrative of this specific moment in time.

 

[Erin] I think that's interesting, because that's making me think about ordering a lot. Which, like, ordering is a function of time… Or whatever. Sure, I'm going to say it is. Ordering is a function of time because I said so.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I think it is.

[Erin] Yeah. But I'm thinking, like, let's say that the character ends by slicing somebody in half. I don't know if this is what happens, but… This is what happens. Then I'm wondering, that, if it's like, if you pick up the sword, sliced the person in half, then notice the weight of it, then think about that it's the fact that it's the sword that your father gave you, it's a completely different emotional experience…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Than if you do all of that before you hit. So, thinking about, like, what order things happen in is really interesting. I also just really love that there are certain things you can do in prose that are difficult to do in other forms. Which is that… Like, I always think people in the world of my character probably find them very annoying because every time they say a line of dialogue, they then think for, like, a long period.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Half a paragraph of deep thought. Return line. Which is, like, an interesting… And we can talk at some other time about dialogue and how not to lose the reader when you, like, have long periods of, like, epic thought in between dialogue. But in real life, that would be quite irritating, unless you think very quickly. But in a story, the reader does want to know what's going on in the character's mind. And so they're willing to, like, pause with you for a moment. Because what they're gaining in that moment of time as a reader is worth the pause in the reality timeline of the story itself.

[Mary Robinette] I think, on that, why don't we pause for a moment?

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I am really enjoying about this conversation is that we're talking about using time in so many different ways. We're talking about the sequencing of a story and how that can change… Just when a character has a reaction. We're talking about using time as a way of… As an extension of setting. And I'd love to actually dig into that part of it just a little more, the idea of time as an extension of setting. I think I've talked about this more on a previous episode, but one of my favorite scenes that taught me so much was from Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey where we get a character going into a room and describing it… First, her experience of it, her interactions with it, when she arrives in the middle of the night and it is fulfilling all of her Gothic fantasy dreams. And then, the next morning, when she gets up, and discovers that the terrifying scratching sound is actually a rosebush that's beautiful outside the window. And that the secret locked cabinet that had a role of enciphered paper in it is actually not actually locked. It was open, she had accidentally locked it, and the enciphered paper is actually a literal laundry list. She just couldn't read it because it was dark. But the… How the literal time can cause the character to experience a place and the reader to experience a place in a different way, which gives you essentially two settings for the price of one.

[Erin] Absolutely. Because we associate certain times of day, I think, with certain things. Like, night and danger often go together. Which is interesting, too, because if you with… If there's a character who's like, not feeling steady in their bones, until the sun goes down, then that's an interesting… That's something different, and what does that mean about the character? What does that say about them? But I often think about, like, I experience my own body differently walking around based a little bit on time of day.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? It's like I am more… Because it feels like you don't have the 360 view in the same way at night. And so I am more conscious of who's around me in the distance. And those are all thoughts that I'm having, and that a character can be having as a way… So then what do they notice? Because we all… The dangers that we view are reflections of our own mentality. And so, the dangers that you view in the night are going to be different than the dangers I view in the night. And so thinking about that, then, that's a great opportunity to maybe get to what are your character's fears? Or what is your character's fearlessness? Where do they feel comfortable? When do they not? When do they feel ill-at-ease? And I think all of those are, like, great moments, I think especially… I think that's especially great when you're trying to get something done clockwise. Like, I need to have the character go to the grocery store…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because it's like, really important later on that they've been there. But it's not interesting at all, so, like… But, if it's all of a sudden, they're going and, it's, like, they've got to go in the middle of the night… Or they need to go out in the day, but they hate their appearance. Then, how does that time actually make something mundane more interesting so that you can hide the plot work that you're doing that will then become more interesting later.

 

[Dan] Yeah. And I think a lot of kind of personal physical cycles can go into this as well. Healthwise is what I'm thinking of, since developing depression and on the particular meds that I'm on right now, I am so much better in the mornings and in the afternoons than I am in the evening. And by the time we get to dinner time, there's just not much of me left. And so I will experience the world and people will experience me in very different ways based on what time of day it is as well.

 

[Mary Robinette] It is interesting how much we are shaped by time. And yet it is also one of those things that I think is hard to convey to readers. Like, the passage of time. The way in which someone is different in the morning then in the evening. One of the questions that I'll hear people ask is, like, how do I let people know that time has passed? If…

[Dan] Yeah. I asked Fonda Lee this question a while ago, because I think she does such a brilliant job of it in the Greenbones saga. With the first book takes about a year, the second about five years, and the third book covers 20, 25 years of time. And how do you convey that so well? One of the little tricks she pointed out was that she made sure to always talk about the children as soon as possible after a time jump, because if the kid that was toddling around and barely verbal last time is suddenly doing his school homework, well, then you know that a certain amount of time has passed. And it became a really interesting shorthand for me to go back and look through the books and go, oh, yeah. She does do that every time there's a time jump.

[Laughter]

[Dan] She starts talking about the kids early on. Because they will change more than the adults will, and so it makes it more obvious that time has gone by.

[Mary Robinette] I think that actually interestingly ties back into what we were talking about for where… How much can you change a place and still have it be recognizable. And, like, how much can you change a time… When you're changing time, what are the pieces? If you don't have the option to have children, if it is just moving day to night, what are the pieces that change, and those are the things that you flag. Like, kids change a lot, but buildings don't change that much. If you're going day to night, the light through the window changes a lot even if nothing else in the room does.

[Dan] Yeah. The temperature could change, the sounds that your hearing outside, whether there's suddenly crickets or something else, that you could… There's a lot of sensory details that you can mention that will immediately clue you in to the passage of time.

[Erin] I also think obligations change over time. Like, from day to night, if you're in a sort of traditional, like, work during the day is the, like… One of the reasons a lot of times writers write late at night and early in the morning is because those are times that people feel that the obligations of life had yet to like come tug on them. And so it's, like, is it quiet in some ways, not just the quiet of the actual room, but the quiet of, like, no one demanding things from you and nobody is needing things from you in this moment.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but… Interestingly, that has been one of the things that has been disruptive for me at this… And I've recognized the symptoms before I say it… That's one of the things that's been disruptive for me about teaching my cat to talk…

[Laughter]

[Erin] There are many, but that's…

[Mary Robinette] Is that her diurnal cycle is not the same as a human's. So she sleeps during the middle of the day, and then, at night, when I am starting to wind down, when, normally, before this, I would have been able to have quiet, because the rest of the world has quieted, that's when she's like, let's play! Let's have zoomies together! Let's use this button board thing and let me mash on it and talk to you. So I have… Like, I'm finding that now I'm starting to write during the middle of the day, which has never been a writing time for me. Because then those obligations, which is this, are quiet.

[Dan] I need to write when my cat shuts up.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God. I love her so much, but choices were made.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] What I love about that is, like, you're not going to get your cat to not be dire… Like, you can have some stern talks, but I don't think it's going to work. And so, also thinking about, like, what are the things… Like, children's growth, like a school day, like, what are the things that keep… That are unchangeable by your character, no matter what they do in the world?

[Mary Robinette] The inevitabilities.

[Erin] These are the inevitabilities of time. At the beginning of the day, they'll have to do this. At the end of the day, they'll have to do that. I was reading Babel…

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Erin] By R. F. Kuang and it's all about school. Like, it's a schoolbook, for at least the portion then I'm in. And so there's a lot about the school year, and, like, the passage of time in a school year, which the characters are going through so much internally, but there's still, like, they have to hit the external, go to this class, be in this place, do this thing by this time. And, I think, we sometimes forget or ignore or get used to the strictures of time in our lives. But maybe we should not do that for our character's lives, and think about how we can use that as an opportunity for tension or fun.

[Mary Robinette] That is a fantastic example of great time passage and using time as setting and time to manipulate character. Speaking of time, it is time for us to give you some homework.

 

[Mary Robinette] And it's a really simple one this time. It's similar to the one that we gave you at the beginning of this, looking at the lens of when and where. And this is just I want you to change the time at which a scene takes place. If you've got a scene that's set during the day, what happens when you move it to the night? What changes? If it's set in the spring, what happens if you move it to the fall? You don't have to make all of the changes, but, what happens if you change the time in which that scene takes place?

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/22/16-34-novels-are-layer-cakes/

 

Key Points: A novel is like a layer cake? Well, layers of information. Revision helps!  Also pre-work can help. Spontaneity is not creativity. Structure also helps. Make sure you are starting the story in the right place, but also make sure we have context. Use tiny flashbacks. Manipulate the POV. Use free indirect speech. Mostly, think about how you want to layer the information, what's important, what order to present it in, and how to slide it in there.

 

[Season 16, Episode 34]

 

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Novels Are Layer Cakes.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dongwon] Okay. So, we're talking about novels as layer cakes. Which may initially sound a little confusing. But, this is one of the central metaphors I think about when I think about what makes a novel a novel that's distinct from a short story or a novella or a novelette. The thing about a novel is it requires more complexity, because you're sustaining a narrative over so long, there need to be so many more different aspects going. So you want layers to be present at almost every point. Especially in an opening scene. I'm not just talking about like two layers of a birthday cake. Ideally, you want like a Mille-Feuille, one of those crêpe cakes that's like layer after layer after layer…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] That gives you that kind of information density in that kind of character and world building and all those elements. We've talked about individual pieces of how to do that so far. But this is really how do you weave all of that into one coherent whole, while still maintaining the distinction of that lamination. We're turning into the great British Bake-Off here. I'm sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I've gotta tell y'a, when I think of layer cakes, I… Sandra makes cakes from time to time. You take the cake pan and you make a bunch of different layers. You saw the tops off of them to make them stack flat. Then I think of the episode of British baking show where they were trying to make dobos tortes with bazillions of little layers. I look at that and think, "No, I'm sorry. That has to be done by a machine and a computer. That is not possible for a human being to make that cake." I know there are many people who look at the way novels are constructed and to step back and see all of that layering and all of that construction and have that same reaction. "I'm sorry. That had to be done by a computer and a machine. No human being can hold all that in their head."

[Dongwon] Yeah. With… We were talking about tell don't show, we kind of touched on this a little bit, but I think this is a case where thinking about movies and TV and visual media is really useful to think about how to layer all this different kinds of information. You're absorbing worldbuilding, you're absorbing character, you're absorbing some of the thematic elements, right? If it… If a scene is lit in a menacing way, it's like, okay, we're in a thriller. If they're wearing Regency dresses, we know the time period and we know the class of the person we are looking at. If the background behind them is an office, then we know what kind of story we're in. So there's automatically many, many more layers in a single shot of film than there is in a book by… As a default. So what you need to think about is how do I start working all that other information that I would get if this were a movie into the text. You have a laser like control over the focus of the reader, so you can show us bit by bit. The downside is you have to do that deliberately. You can't just rely on us passively absorbing that information.

[Mary Robinette] A lot of this will come down to word choice, specificity, I mean, all of the different things that we've been talking about for the past several weeks. You're trying to manipulate all of those at the same time. It's what is the character noticing, what order do you feed that information to the reader, which pieces are you telling versus which pieces are you showing. Is this sentence a long sentence or a short sentence? What is my word choice here? Am I going to say, "Pulled out of a chair," or "jerked out of a chair"? Because those are two different things. This is… This is complicated. I will disagree slightly with Dongwon because this is also something that you do with short stories, and in many cases, it is more vital because you have less space. But I understand… But the layers of plot that you have to deal with in a short story are not as many as you have to deal with in a novel. This is, for me, one of the biggest differences and the thing to think about regardless in some ways if you are writing a short story or novel. That first page is framing the thing that you're getting into. In a short story, you're framing a small thing, and it's like, this is the emotional punch that you're going to get. But in a novel, you're framing something that has multiple different emotional punches that you're going to get. You're going to have multiple plot threads. How do you tell the reader, kind of, which of these is the thing that… Like, which one do you introduce as, "Here. This is the thing I'm drawing a line under. This is the story that you're going to be in on." Because you have to make that choice. Is this a coming-of-age? Yes. Is this also an epic adventure? Yes. Where do you start?

[Dongwon] Yeah. I'm going to say, actually, I'm in complete agreement with Mary Robinette. When I say that a short story has fewer layers, I purely mean in terms of character arcs and plot lines. When that information density, I don't care what you're writing, you're going to need to make sure each word, each sentence, is doing as much work as it can, while maintaining crystal clarity for the reader.

 

[Dan] Yeah. I want to emphasize the importance of revision.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] For this. Because, like Howard was talking about, if you're making a layer cake, most of the time you're making several different cakes in several different batches and then you're combining them together later on. I'm… I don't think that you have to do that with writing. I'm not going to say that you can't, because I'm sure that there are people who do. But what I do do is I will write out… The first draft is often just focused entirely on plot or on character. Then I have to go back through multiple revisions and say now I'm going to add in the other parts.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Now I'm going to emphasize more of the description… Now I'm going to do another revision pass to really drill into internal monologue and emotion. It does take… You're going to have to get a lot of cake pans dirty by the end of this revision process.

[Dongwon] Your first draft is going to look more like Nailed It! than British Bake-Off, and that's okay.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Well, so… Continuing our cake metaphor. So, first of all, I do the same thing that Dan does. I do multiple passes. The second thing is, right now I am reading… And this is not our book of the week. I'm reading Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage, which is about making. In the entire time I'm reading it, I'm like, "Oh, dear Lord, this is about writing a novel… Or this is about writing." In the midst of it, he talks about making a cake, and that one of the things that, in general, you want to do while making is to set yourself up for success with your pre-work, and that chefs go in and they lay out all of… Here's the bowls that I'm going to need. Here are the ingredients that I'm going to need. They measure things. It feels like it's so much more work, but it in many ways will go faster. It can often feel like, "Oh! But my creativity!"

[Whem]

[Mary Robinette] But what we're talking about here is, with this idea of a layer cake, and especially when you're learning the tools, it's okay to learn, like, one tool at a time. When you… When we're talking about pre-work, that doesn't necessarily have to mean, oh, you're going to outline everything. Oh, you're going to do all your world building ahead of time. What we're talking about is the number of iterations it takes you to get to a product that you're happy with. So sometimes you have fewer drafts, because you've done a lot of pre-work. Sometimes you have multiple drafts, because that is the process that you particularly enjoy going through in order to get to that layer cake. You may only have one bowl in your kitchen. So you have to mix that bowl and then clean it, and then mix the next bowl and then clean it. You may have a ton of bowls, so you can lay it all out. Everybody's kitchen is different, everybody's brain is different. Every cake that you bake, every book that you write, every short story… All of these are different. But the point of it is to remember that there are layers, that there are multiple ingredients that you have to be managing.

[Howard] If there's one thing that has stuck with me after 20 years of Schlock Mercenary, from beginning to finally ending the whole thing, it's that I cannot afford to conflate spontaneity with creativity. Those are not the same thing. Spontaneity is fine, and it has its place. But creativity is never being throttled by me imposing a structure. It's being funneled, it's being channeled, it's being directed. It's… I love having a structure, and so the layering of things in a novel is incredibly helpful. The current work in progress… I had about a 4000 word scene which I couldn't make work all at once because the voice had to be consistent, but the voice is kind of tiring. It's that noir detective sort of lots of humorous metaphors, lots of weird extensions. Can't be maintained well by the reader. I realized that, "Oh, wait. This is… I wanted to use this to frame some of the other characters. What happens if I carve it into chunks?" What happens if I make separate cake pans and saw the tops off of it and then use… I call it a common tone modulation, where the theme of one scene kind of introduces the theme of the next one, even though something has changed. As I began assembling that, yeah, there's no spontaneity anymore, but the creative fire is raging, because now I can see how it needs to be built.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's pause for our book of the week. When we come back, what I'd love for us to do is… We've talked now about the importance, and I'd love for us when we come back to talk about some of the hows, of how to do that. So, Dan, I think you have the book of the week this time.

[Dan] Yes. So, our book of the week is Legend by Marie Lu. Marie Lu is an absolutely incredible science fiction writer. This book is a kind of a YA dystopia. It's about 10-ish years old from back when YA dystopias were all the rage. This one has stood the time better than most, I think. It's called Legend, like I said. I wish I had the time to read you like the entire first page. But I'm just going to read you the first two sentences.

 

My mother thinks I'm dead. Obviously, I'm not dead, but it's safer for her to think so.

 

[Wow]

[Dan] That says… Tells you so much. It is asking you compelling questions. It's introducing elements of the character. It goes on in the next paragraph, if I had time to read that, just lays out incredible detail about the world that this takes place in. There is so much density of information, while also being incredibly compelling and readable. It's a wonderful book. It's called Legend by Marie Lu.

 

[Dongwon] So, as Mary Robinette mentioned, I do want to talk about some of the mechanics, about how you make this work. I think when I'm in writing workshops the thing that I see most commonly, like the feedback I'm giving like 60 or 70% of the time is I think you're starting the story in the wrong place. This kind of goes back to what we were saying about the earlier mistakes is often… Or the common mistakes is I often see that the story's starting too early. It's starting before interesting things are happening. Now the problem is if you jump into when interesting things are happening, we don't have context. Which leads to the common mistake of the gunfight problem where then you're like, "What's going on? Why do I care about all this?" The solution, for me, is that layer cake. Right? So you can start when things are kicking off, you can start in the heart of the inciting incident, and then you manipulate the timeline. You don't have to go straight A, B, C, D. You can start at C, and then tell us about A, right? You can layer in those tiny flashbacks. They don't have to be big scenes. They can be a sentence. It's like, "Oh. Yeah. When I woke up today, I wasn't expecting this." Right? You can layer those things in to give us the context of where this character comes from, what do they care about, and then introduce stakes that may not be immediate to this scene. Like, the stakes of the scene is I need to get out of this gunfight because my sister needs to go to school today. Right? I don't know what book I've just written here…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] But it's something, right?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, that sounds like Jade City, actually.

[Dongwon] Kind of. Actually. Right? Like, if the character cares about something, then suddenly I, the reader, care about this gunfight. I think when you think about how do I change the timeline, I think you can get a lot more of that density in and start layering those elements in from sentence to sentence, from clause to clause, and really get all of that information into my brain much faster than if you did it sequentially.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other piece of that when you're dealing with that kind of thing, one of your best tools for stacking that information is the manipulation of POV. So, we have talked a lot about all of the things that make… In previous episodes, about all of the things that make a point of view. If you go back to the very first episode that I appear on, which is episode… What was it?

[Howard] Three, 14.

[Mary Robinette] Three, 14. Right. Because it's pi. In which I talk about puppetry and focus and breath and internal motivation and all of those things. All of those pieces are the things that make up POV. But the other piece of POV that you have to manipulate is the showing versus telling, the describing versus demonstrating. It's basically are you… You can pull back and go a little omniscient for a moment. You can go deep in. Those moments, those choices that you make, allow you to layer information in. Within that, one of my favorite tools is free indirect speech. Where you can have the narrator basically just say something to the reader, even if it's in third person. So, this example is from Wikipedia, which actually has a great explanation of what free indirect speech is. So, quoted or direct speech would be: 

 

He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And what pleasure have I found since I came into this world," he asked.

 

Whereas free indirect speech is something more like:

 

"He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found since he came into this world?

 

So, that thought just goes straight into the text. You can do so much with that to layer in information. She picked up the knife. Her grandfather had given it to her. That's just like, "Ah, I picked up the knife. Ah, my grandfather gave this to me." That slows us down. It's popping in and out. So, these are the kinds of things that you can be thinking about and manipulating when you're playing with that opening.

[Dongwon] I'm going to give another very highfalutin literary example here, but if you ever have the chance, go take a look at Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. There's a very famous scene of Clarissa walking down a street. There's like somebody's doing sky writing and she uses that to slide from POV to POV to POV in this scene as you move through the crowd. You really jump… Like, someone will make eye contact, and then suddenly you'll be in that character's head. It's a master class in how you can use POV to build out a complete scene, and the balance between telling and showing. Of telling us a piece of information about another person, dropping into their mind to see how they see the world, and then sliding back out into someone else's POV. If you want to think about how powerful shifting that perspective can be in building out a narrative, both in terms of using free indirect speech in terms of subjective experience and seeing things from different angles in that Rashomon style, even that one scene, if you don't read the whole book, I think is an enormously instructive thing to take a look at.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we are now at the point where we are at our final homework. Dongwon has this for us. But I'm actually going to tag on at the end of it with a trick. So this is going to be a tagteam homework, and he has no idea that I'm doing this. This is information that I probably should have layered in earlier.

[Dongwon] Well, I'm also calling an audible and I'm going to shift what the homework is. So we're going to see if our two plans line up right here.

[Mary Robinette] Okay, then.

[Dan] [Oooo]

[Dongwon] So, I think the thing I want you to do is actually to delete your entire first scene from your draft. I mean, save it somewhere else. Put it under a different name, don't throw out your draft. But I want you to start from word one for that first scene and rewrite it using all of the tools that we've talked about here. I want you to think about the exercises you've done up to this point rewriting that scene using all those different tools, characters' interiority, that sort of narrative description, describing the world building and setting. Then redo it and try and think about how am I go to layer all these techniques into a single whole? How do you make that cake feel more complete using these tools?

[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. I am going to tag onto that, that once you've done that, but I want you to do is I want you to revise it. I want you to tighten it. The way I want you to do that is I want you to go through and highlight which things you really need the reader to know and make sure that they are in the right order. Then I'm going to see if you can fit them into a single paragraph. So what you're going to do is… This is an editing technique that I call one phrase per concept or one sentence per concept. So each concept, you're like, "Okay. They absolutely have to know that there are dragons and the dragons can talk. They absolutely have to know that this is 1950s. They absolutely have to know that I'm at a girls' boarding school." Okay, so that gives me four sentences. Then you get one more sentence for tone. Because tone is incredibly important. That is also a piece of information that the reader has. This is just an editing exercise. Then your final thing is probably going to be somewhere in between those two. But that is a way to start really, really thinking about which layer is important to you as you start your novel.

[Dongwon] I think these two homeworks dovetail beautifully. I think, by the time you're done with it, you'll have a killer first page that's going to work great for you.

[Mary Robinette] So, now you are really and truly out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/13/13-19-backstories/

Key points: Backstory affects everything a character does, so it is one of the most important aspects of a character, but you also don't need to map out everything and try to fit it all in. A broad overview, similar to what you have of your friend's backstory, is probably enough. Then, when you are writing  a character, you may find yourself inventing back story in the moment to explain their reaction. When you find you need more backstory, stop, make notes, and then later go back and weave it in. Sometimes you may want to build lots of backstory, but be very conscious of what the reader needs to know versus what you may need to know. Where can you fit in backstory? At the end of every action scene, as a pause or rest. Or when a character is interacting with something that triggers it. In conversation! Flashbacks are not just to give information. They should be presented at the right time to shape the interaction the reader is having with the story, to propel a story forward. Flashbacks that break the forward momentum of the story fail, while flashbacks that add to the momentum work well. You can use flashbacks to build a mystery and answer it, or to deepen it. Put your flashbacks in when the reader wants it. Avoid tangential zoom flashbacks. Think about what your character inherited, where they are now, where they want to be, and where they think they are. Those four parts are your character's cultural backbone. Then discover the rest as you write.

 

 

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and go to our homework.

[Mary] All right. So your homework is I want you to explore what these different tools do. So I want you to write a scene where a character has a flashback that exposes some aspects of their backstory. Then I want you to reset that scene again. And this time, in that same scene, they are going to talk to another character about their backstory, so that they're having to deal with the ramifications of it in real time.

[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.